Karma Cleanser - February 06 2008

Dear Karma Cleanser:

The question I have has to do with sexual karma. Since I got divorced a couple of years ago, I haven’t had much of a sex drive. My sexual appetite had already started to go downhill as we were in the final stages of the marriage, and I feel like it never recovered after we split.

All my friends have told me to get back “on the scene” and start dating again because I’m still young (not yet 30) and reasonably attractive. I just feel like I’ve been burned and I’m not eager to go through that again.

Against my better judgment, I did wind up with a stranger in my bed recently. I had been drinking with some friends at a local bar, and the next thing I knew happy hour had turned into 11 o’clock and I was asking a new acquaintance if she wanted to “hang out later.” She said she’d been hoping I’d say that.

The next morning I felt terrible because, as I said before, I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy. It had been so long since I’d been with another person that I had a little, um, “performance anxiety.” Luckily my lady friend was very patient and actually kind of adorable. It also freaked me out because I felt like she’d had more one-night stands than me. A lot more.

Anyway, it’s been a week since our hookup, and I’ve seen this girl at the same bar. I feel weird around her and around my friends who know we slept together. One of them in particular was giving me a hard time, and he told me (jokingly) that, “karma was going to bite me on the ass,” unless I kept talking to the girl who’d gone home with me. Well, he was right, and also wrong.

That night at home I discovered a weird spot on my privates. I won’t gross you out with the details, but I’m thinking I got an STD from the hookup. So yeah, I guess you could say this was sexual karma proving to me that I’m better off celibate, right?

We believe that everyone creates his or her own karma, and yours is a case of a self-fulfilling impotency, er, prophesy. The one-night stand might have supplied some much-needed sexual healing that you never got after your marriage ended, but you’ve successfully convinced yourself that physical intimacy only leads to suffering. Get thee to your general practitioner, pronto. First have him inspect the mystery scab on Mr. Happy (or, from the sound of it, Unhappy) to see if your STD scare is for real. While you’re there, have him check you to see if your lowered sex drive has a physiological root – which is possible, even at your young age. Then again, if you’d been drinking since happy hour, no wonder your little groundhog was afraid to see his shadow.

Been bad? karmacleanser@gmail.com.